ESP32 is really hot, the first lot we got sold out for couple of days. If we didn’t put the restriction for one module per order it would be sold out in matter of hours, as people wanted to buy x5 and x10.

ESP32-WROOM-32 modules are shipped from Espressif and we wait them to arrive next week.

Meantime we started the design of our ESP32-EVB board.

What we think so far is to have these features:

power supply from 5V

LiPo charger and step up converter to allow un-interruptable power supply

Two relays 220VAC/15A

Two user buttons

UEXT connector to which you can connect many of our sensor UEXT boards, or to program the board with serial cable same way like ESP8266-EVB

status LEDs

With the two relays you will be able to switch on and off two different appliances.

With the sensors on UEXT you will be able to measure temperature, light, moisture etc. and log them.

The plan is to complete the design in October and start selling this board in November.

We made all connections backward compatible so all code for 1K will work on 8K too. just here you have much more resources and more GPIOs which are wired to 4 small 40 pin 0.05″ step connectors. These can be connected to external boards either with cable either with female matching connectors which are in our shop.

Now we are testing for silly mistakes, if everything is OK will run it in production next month.

The FPGA programming on original Lattice icestick development board is done with FTDI USB to SPI converter, but we avoid this unreliable company in our designs.

You can run the Icestorm on A20-OLinuxino-MICRO and we preparing patch which to allow iceprog to run on OLinuXino and program the iCE40 via the UEXT connector.

For these who want to use USB programmer we prepare patch for using OLIMEXINO-32U4 (or any other Arduino) as programmer, sure OLIMEXINO is most convenient to be used as programmer as already have UEXT connector which to wire directly to iCE40 10 pin programming port.

EDIT: At TuxCon in July we will have FPGA workshop with this board – we will teach you FPGA basics, how they are programming and first steps with verilog, at the end you will make your own first Verilog program and program it at iCE40HX1K-EVB. We are going to prepare examples how to use the ADC/DAC/VGA/PS2 etc add-on boards.

A64 was announced January this year by Allwinner. It’s a quad core 64 bit Cortex-A53 processor targeting tablets.

Some features are:

H.265/H.264 video decoding in hardware

HDMI 4K display support

DDR3L memory with lower consumption is supported

eMMC 5.0 support

Last week we got notice that Allwinner have already A64 in production and we will get some chips with the software SDK for Android 5.1 based on Linux Kernel 3.10 by the end of the month (yes they finally escaped from Kernel 3.4 🙂 ), so we started to work on our A64-OLinuXino.

This chip is with humble peripherials, as Allwinner target and announcement is to sell it for $5 in volume (obviously not for mortals as we have to buy the first chips at higher than this price).

LCD parallel RGB, LCD LVDS, MIPI and HDMI video output

Camera interface

One USB Host

One USB-OTG

Two SPI

Four I2C

Six UARTs

As you can see no Ethernet, no SATA, no PCIe, but this is what you get for $5 right ?

What we found is also that although being 64-bit ARM the A64 memory bus is just 32-bit wide, we guess to make BOM smaller.

This will hurt the performance, so we have to see how it will behave compared to A20 and H3 for instance.

This will be our first 64 bit ARM board and also the first OLinuXino we make completely with KiCAD.

If everything goes smoothly we will have first prototypes by end of November and depend on how fast we can test the software we may have these run in production for Christmas 🙂 the goal is to make 64-bit ARM with EUR 64 retail price!

As I expect A64 with 4 cores Cortex-A53 will behave well running Desktop Linux so we are evaluating the option to find some Chinese laptop manufacturer and ask them to supply us just with some light laptop body with decent 10.1-11.6″ LCD display, camera and keyboard with touch-pad. We can re-design A64 board to fit inside this laptop body and to make light under 1 kg laptop running Linux.

One of the problem is that A64 is quite new and no any Linux-Sunxi support, as nobody have seen A64 development boards yet. SO it may pass several months until A64-OLinuXino run anything else than Android 5.1

ESP8266 already got a lot of attention, but the problem is that this chip has more to offer than just UART to WIFI module, there is C compiler, SDK which allow you to write user program and have access to all GPIOs and resources of the chip so instead to add dumb microcontroller to ESP8266 module you will be able to put all your application in the ESP8266 itself.

The problem is that most existing modules do not allow access to all ESP8266 resources… until now, you see the untilate development board for ESP8266 now, it have access to all ESP8266 resources, GPIOs, bootloader etc.

The module MOD-WIFI-8266-DEV have UEXT connector footprint on the back so it can connect to all OLIMEX boards which have UEXT connectors, two rows of 0.1″ connectors for breadboarding and split pads which could be soldered directly to PCB.

For these who want to use ESP8266 just as SERIAL-to-WIFI bridge MOD-WIFI-ESP8266 is the better choice with smaller size and soldered female UEXT connector it direcly will plug to any board with UEXT.